Here Comes the Night (46 page)
In two days, they cut eight songs. The nine-minute “T. B. Sheets” was an unprecedented improvisation with its claustrophobic images of a slow, languishing death. They were all Morrison’s songs, except for one cover of something Berns did previously with Solomon Burke, “Goodbye Baby (Baby Goodbye).” Morrison was not comfortable with
the professionalism of the accompanists. “I think it should be freer,” he said between takes of “He Ain’t Give You None.” “At the minute, we have a choke thing going, know what I mean?”
Morrison flew home to an uncertain future the next day, after signing a publishing deal with Web IV for a $500 advance. He wrote his California girlfriend to listen to her radio and when she heard “Brown-Eyed Girl,” he would be coming back to her.
Neil Diamond wrote “Girl You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” his second Top Ten record that April 1966, on his first real tour with a band the previous December of 1965, a thirty-two-city, twenty-eight-day ordeal with Tommy Roe, Billy Joe Royal, and P.J. Proby through the South and the Midwest where Diamond first encountered screaming teeny-boppers. He was on a hot streak. His Monkees song, “I’m a Believer,” earned him his first number one hit, five weeks at the top of the charts. He was turning out a procession of top-quality songs for his Bang singles. He wrote “Kentucky Woman” in the back of a limousine outside Paducah, Kentucky, on the same tour. He was starting to assert himself in the studio more. He asked Barry not to mix “You Got to Me” until he got back in town off tour because he didn’t like the background vocals.
Berns went with Tommy Eboli, Patsy Pagano, and Wassel to watch Emile Griffith lose the middleweight championship to the Italian welterweight Nino Benvenuti at Madison Square Garden in April. Also sitting ringside was Frank Costello, the retired Mob boss. Costello knew Wassel from when he used to frequent Duke’s Bar and Grill, a well-known Mob hangout in Cliffside, New Jersey, that Wassel’s uncle owned in the thirties. Wassel was a punk kid who used to run around with a pickpocket pal and consider it a good day when they grabbed eight or ten wallets and made as much as $18. Costello joined the party for the ride home in the limousine. Berns concealed his excitement. Costello asked Berns, in the soft murmur in which he spoke, where was he from. Bronx, Berns said. Costello took that in. What kind of business are you in, Costello asked. The record business, said Berns, and the old man lit up.
“The record business,” he said, “is a very good business.”
Berns liked hanging around the wiseguys. These men wielded the ultimate unfair business advantage because implicit in all their dealings was the understanding that they would kill anyone who didn’t do what they wanted. This was raw, vicious power, almost intoxicating in its purity and simplicity. Gangsters moved easily through the world of show business and have always found willing associates among the ranks—Frank Sinatra, for instance.
Berns came to be friends with these people, and his music business associates were both intrigued and frightened by his new pals. Berns took Patsy Pagano and his wife on cruises with music business buddies such as Jeff Barry and Jerry Ragovoy, with their wives and girlfriends. Freddie Scott huddled over a rail on Berns’s boat with Pagano. “Don’t worry,” the gangster told the singer. “We’re going to take care of you.”
The more successful Berns became, the more impatient he grew. His fuse was shorter and his temper could be fierce. He was still the same warm, encouraging guy, but he could show a steely reserve when pressed. He could flash with righteous indignation in support of Israel, although not much of a practicing Jew, and he talked openly about volunteering for the Israeli army when war broke out in June. At his new studio, which he dubbed Incredible Sounds, the drawer in his desk was crammed with pill bottles and a .38-caliber revolver.
Jerry Wexler celebrated his fiftieth birthday with an industry dinner at the Hotel St. Regis in January 1967. Jerry Ragovoy didn’t know anything was wrong when he walked in the ballroom with Berns and they brushed past Wexler and Ertegun in the hallway. Ragovoy was shocked at the tense, unspoken anger between them and Berns. He thought they were best friends. The chill in the air was almost palpable. Wexler and Berns ignored each other, Ragovoy couldn’t help but notice.
Ahmet Ertegun delivered the keynote and toasted his partner. Privately, if they had been estranged before Wexler tried to pull that number with Leiber and Stoller and the Red Bird merger, Ertegun and
Wexler were now barely on speaking terms. Their relationship would never be restored; Ahmet could never fully trust Wexler again. That was also something the son of the Turkish diplomat would never let anyone know. He lavished praise on him at the birthday dinner.
AT THIS POINT,
Wexler’s Southern strategy was keeping the label afloat. Stax/Volt was turning out a steady stream of hits with the glorious Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, and others. Wexler had taken Pickett back to Muscle Shoals in October 1966 and came out with “Mustang Sally” and a half dozen or more other tracks. While in the studio at Muscle Shoals, Wexler received a phone call from a gospel deejay he knew in Philadelphia. She told him Aretha Franklin was ready to talk to him.
Aretha Franklin was certainly no secret. Even before she cut a chilling live album for the Chess Records label at age fourteen, she was widely known as something like a child prodigy singing in the New Bethel Baptist Church choir, where her father was pastor. Reverend C.L. Franklin ran one of the largest, most prestigious black congregations in Detroit. He was an important ally of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and a recording artist who made best-selling gospel albums of his sermons, such as “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest.” Franklin and her sisters grew up in a home that was one of the great black literary, political, and cultural salons in the country. Dinner guests ranged from Adam Clayton Powell to Dinah Washington. Young Aretha Franklin knew Sam Cooke, whose father led an important church in Chicago, since he was a young buck gospel singer.
She dropped out of school after she had her second child out of wedlock at age sixteen and devoted herself to music. For five years, she recorded for Columbia Records—signed by the venerable John Hammond, who brought Count Basie, Billie Holiday, and Bob Dylan to the label—but Mitch Miller turned out to be less than the ideal a&r man for her.
Her husband/manager Ted White cut a very simple three-song demo in Detroit that floored Wexler. From the opening blast of “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” Aretha Franklin was bringing ecstatic gospel to the sound of soul. Wexler knew instantly. He invited her out to Great Neck. They talked music, played records, felt each other out. She agreed to sign with Atlantic. Wexler’s first thought was to put her with the Stax/Volt operation, as he did with Sam & Dave, but Jim Stewart of Stax balked at the $25,000 price tag, so Wexler decided to take her to Muscle Shoals.
Aretha Franklin coming to FAME Studios was a big deal, the most important session yet at the tiny outpost. The all-white crew threw together on the spot an arrangement for “I Never Loved a Man” around a keyboard part by Spooner Oldham, one of the Muscle Shoals regulars. In rapid order, the track came together and the horn charts were scribbled down and overdubbed.
With one great cut done, celebration was in order. Colbert County was dry and it was against Rick Hall’s rules to drink in the studio, but musicians will find a way. Ted White and one of the horn players, both nipping from the same bottle, got into it over something that White perceived as a racial slur. He and his wife were the only blacks in the room and they were in the Deep South. The session ended for the day with the instrumental track to the B-side, “Do Right Woman—Do Right Man,” only partly completed.
During the evening, everything went to hell. Rick Hall and Ted White got into a fistfight. White and Aretha stormed out of the hotel in the middle of the night. Wexler told Hall he would never work with him again (he was back within weeks with Pickett again, cutting, among other things, a new song by Berns, “Mojo Mama,” even if they were also on the outs).
Back in New York, Wexler sent acetates of the track to key disc jockeys, but he couldn’t release the single until he had a B-side. Before Wexler would release the single, he took Franklin back for
more sessions (importing the Muscle Shoals sidemen to New York City for the occasion). The second session she brought in the Otis Redding song “Respect” that she’d been doing in her live act for more than a year. She brought in her sisters Carolyn and Erma and drilled them on the vocals. By the end of February, before the first single hit in March, the entire album was done and on the last day of the sessions Wexler had one more track in the can recorded that sounded like another sure thing.
Wexler had been driving by Grand Central Station when he saw Gerry Goffin walking down the sidewalk. His limousine pulled over and Wexler rolled down the window. “I have a great title for an Aretha Franklin song,” he told Goffin. “‘You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.’” A couple of weeks later, Goffin and King brought Wexler’s custom-ordered song into the Atlantic offices. Wexler earned a third of the copyright for the title. He cut the song with Aretha the day after she finished her first Atlantic album and tucked away the string-laden, pop track for a later date. “I Never Loved a Man” vaulted into the Top Ten when it was released in March, but when “Respect” blasted its way to number one the following month, Aretha Franklin was crowned Queen of Soul by popular acclaim and Wexler had made it happen.
To Harold Logan, Aretha’s coronation meant there might finally be a little money in her older sister, Erma Franklin, whom Logan had managed for the previous five years without much success. Aretha’s sister had always been a singer. In fact, when Berry Gordy Jr. was first starting his record label in Detroit, he and songwriting partner Billy Davis were more interested in Erma than her sister, who they thought was too gospelish. They rehearsed young Erma Franklin on songs they eventually recorded with others (“All I Could Do Was Cry” by Etta James and “You Got What It Takes” by Marv Johnson) but never recorded her.
Reverend Franklin insisted his oldest daughter finish college before she commenced a musical career anyway. After graduating from Clark College in Atlanta, Erma moved to New York in 1961 and signed with
Epic Records, subsidiary of Columbia Records, where her younger sister was already making records. Harold Logan, a well-known tough bastard, signed her for management and put her out as opening act for his business partner, Lloyd Price. She made jazzy records nobody noticed for Epic and sang on the road with the sixteen-piece Lloyd Price Orchestra.
After five years, she was still making the same money as she did the first day. When she quit Logan and went to work in a day job for a downtown advertising agency, she started out making more money than she ever did on the road. After her sister hit the charts, Logan contacted Erma about making some demos and shopping a record deal. She agreed only if she could do the music in her spare time. They took the demos to Berns, and she told Berns she would only record at night. Berns liked the idea of signing Aretha’s sister—there was definitely something to work with there, plus it would piss off Wexler. They went into the studio and cut an old Jimmy Reed song, “Big Boss Man”—she was a big blues fan from her college days—and a song from her other sister, Carolyn, “Don’t Catch the Dog’s Bone,” which picked up some r&b airplay when it was released on Shout Records in June.
Hoagy Lands also came back into Berns’s life. The singer and Berns parted ways after Lands declined to join the Drifters but went instead with Doug Morris, the onetime junior song plugger at Mellin who left music publishing to do a&r at Laurie Records with the Schwartz brothers. Morris made a few singles with Lands, all very much in the style of Berns, including a gorgeous remake of Berns’s “White Gardenia,” but nothing came of any of them. Berns took Lands into the studio and cut another piece of thumping faux Southern soul that went unreleased, “32 Miles Out of Waycross (Mojo Mama),” a song on which he shared songwriting credits with Wexler, who already cut the number with Pickett at Muscle Shoals.
*
Berns was still writing regularly with Jerry Ragovoy, who viewed Berns’s new associates with growing alarm. Berns showed him his gun. “This is power,” he told Ragovoy, who started to deliberately retreat from Berns’s orbit after that. They continued to write together. Berns, who never knew Ragovoy was keeping his distance, would call with a song already underway. They continued to turn out luminous soul ballads for Garnett Mimms—“I’ll Take Good Care of You” was only the latest—which Ragovoy produced on record. Berns would give Ragovoy a trademark look every time he tried out any kind of exotic chord and say, “Stop that bebop shit.”
One afternoon with the wives at Berns’s house, Berns took Ragovoy aside to run down another tune. All he had was the chorus—
Take it, take another little piece of my heart
. He had previously showed the song to Van Morrison, hoping to write a hit with him, but Van Morrison doesn’t collaborate. He played the song for Ragovoy on guitar, while their wives chatted in the other room. They didn’t work on it that afternoon, but Ragovoy took the song home and worked up the verse, both the melody and the lyrics. Berns added the
come on, come on
—pure Bert—into the chorus when they got back together and hammered the song in place. When they brought the song to the studio, Erma Franklin made Berns slow the tempo. In everybody’s mind, they were just making another hit record and this was just another great song by Berns, but it was not that simple. In “Piece of My Heart,” Berns was writing his own pathology.
Berns, about the same time, also brought Ragovoy another song, “Heart Be Still,” that Rags recognized immediately as a note-for-note rewrite of James Cleveland’s landmark gospel song, “Peace Be Still.” Cleveland’s 1963 recording of the eighteenth-century madrigal with the First Baptist Church choir of Nutley, New Jersey, sold an astounding 1 million copies, one of the biggest-selling gospel records ever, and vaulted Cleveland into the front ranks of gospel performers and suddenly made massed choirs fashionable with young people. Every black
disc jockey in the country would recognize the tune. Ragovoy knew it was not a song to be messing with, but Berns didn’t care. He gave his song one of the bleakest opening verses he ever wrote.
